Monastic Retreat, Engagement
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Monks interest me--they always have. Monastic tradition (at least what I've read of it) captures in material terms the essential contradiction of Jesus' exhortation to be in the world, but not of it. Over the years, books such as Thomas Merton's Seeds of Contemplation, Esther de Waal's Seeking God, Brother Lawrence's Practicing the Presence of God, Thomas Moore's On the Monk Who Dwells in Daily Life, Anthony DeMello's Awareness, and various other writings on Benedictine practice have caught my attention, inspired me to move to a deeper, quieter place with God.
This is problematic for the folks of my evangelical religious tradition, who cast religious fervor in terms of souls saved, bible studies conducted, and swearing, fornication, gambling and other such sin avoided, all the while wrestling the biblical text as if it were the angel of Jacob, determined to figure out in exact rational terms what the formula is for salvation, deep goodness be damned. There is a continual great pressure to produce concrete action in the name of Jesus a la James long-contested words, "Faith without works is dead." But put Paul's observation (I Corinthians 13) that works in themselves prove nothing next to James, and you arrive back at the core question, the fundamental transformation called for by Christian faith: how does the corrupt heart change, so that spontaneous inclinations are moved from the evil to the good, from hate to love, from cursing to praise?
I wrote last week of God's dwelling place perhaps being found in the moment of love given, that action being a kind of mercy seat wherein we meet God. That in the active reaching out, God perhaps allows us to touch, or be touched by, the life of the Christ, infusing us with a new strain of life, old dead spirit replaced again by new, living Spirit.
But Christ also calls us to the silence of the closet, the close quartered life where we might discover God speaking quietly to us, working on our thought-life, conversing with us about the yielding of the particulars of this day. While monastic silence and quiet are sometimes cast as escape (and they can indeed be that), retreat and contemplation are important arenas wherein we find the capacity to see human beings as Jesus sees them. The world is such a noisy, frightening place--the cheers of crowds, the spin of political pundits, the rage of warmongers and peaceniks alike--that it can be difficult to resist the temptation to simply close the soul off, and run for the proverbial hills. That way lies death. But the simple quiet sought for the sake of knowing how better to confront the noise and the frightened (and the fear)...that way lies life, and power.
Contradiction. Paradox. Die to live. Retreat to engage. Fast to feed.
Suddenly, I wonder...am I still talking about Beauty?
7:53:28 AM 
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